Most of the organizations are focusing on customer experience management as a strategic objective and those who are not, will soon be forced to or will vanish. There are sophisticated products and services which are claiming to ensure customer experience management. However the actual benefits and dollar ROI calculations/measurements are missing. I agree that it is difficult to measure customer experience management.

Customer experience can be classified as overall experience of a customer in complete lifecycle starting from prospects to retaining and engaging a customer. If I broadly look at it customer experience management covers three aspects – Customer Acquisition, Customer Engagement and Customer Retention. Customer Acquisition is acquiring new customers; “word of mouth” is still a top factor for consumers to decide on buying any new service or product. Organizations are focusing on how to improve the efficiency of the onboarding process of a new customer. Customer engagement is how well you engage your customers. How do you grab their attention and hold on to it? The examples could be great user interface designs, intuitive smart phone applications, intelligent self-services etc. Customer Retention is how well you retain customers knowing that more than 89% of customers stop doing business with an organization after a single bad experience.

Multi-channel contact centers can immensely help in managing customer experiences. Some of the interesting figures in support of customer experience management and multichannel contact centers are*:

92% of organizations that view customers experience as a differentiator offer multiple channels.

* Source: Deloitte “2013 Global Contact Center Survey Results”

The Gen Y customers need swift and personalized responses for their queries and service requests. They want to use any device of their choice and want the services to be accessible through different channels. In a multichannel contact center some of the examples of how customer experience can be managed are – Providing more intuitive and user friendly interfaces on smart phones and web, leveraging social media, analyzing customer feedbacks and recommendations, learning customer interests and personalizing the offerings. For contact centers passing contextual information across channels e.g. if a customer is browsing a website and looking at TV products and he/she decides to talk to customer service representative (CSR) then the CSR should get prior information about what product the prospective customer was looking for.To know more about HCL's customer experience management services visit this section.